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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> Adam Mendler, a workplace expert, told Inc. that this kind of exercise carries real risk when companies invite openness without ever clarifying how that vulnerability will be treated afterward.

I always felt that those trust exercises, "bring your whole self to work", "let us pay for a personality test so we can know each other better" are all ruses to find the most gullible people and then take advantage of them or get rid of them.

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Please don't bring your whole self to work, the rest of us don't need that from you. Be polite, congenial and professional. You have the rest of your day to let it rip however you'd like.

Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.

Their humanity does not serve the bottom line.

Employers who expect to know things about employee's personal lives are despicable.

I expect to accomplish my tasks. I can be friendly, polite and humorous but you don't need to know anything about how I live.

The main factor is a boss or supervisor can act on their judgement of an employee and employees do not have the same leverage.

That is right. The hierarchical nature of this setting makes it impossible to be fully open, unless you truly are the most uninteresting person on the planet. If not, open and indiscriminate sharing is going to be a potential liability. Some things in life are very useful to know, and I believe being deliberate about what you share about yourself with whom is one of them.

If you ask your employer to treat you like a robot - don't be surprised when you get replaced by a robot.

As long as it's a subculture that is tacitly approved by the group and by management.

For example? Because usually, people who say this have something in their mind about which they should rightfully be ashamed. Like people who want other people to have lesser rights.

Ethical non-monogamy is one example.

Anything class, caste, race, gender, etc. clustered can draw fire if they aggravate group harmony and conformity enough to someone.

For example, I currently deal with the knife and gun collector crowd, hunting fans, weed guys, even genz sneaker aficionados bring the ire of various classes or camps that are more dominant at workplaces.

What is the reason for that anger?

Then I hope you have an extremely flat company structure, not just formally but in practice.

Don't try to fast-talk people into opening up. They have a better idea than you what's safe to talk about, about their lives. If they think they can't open up, they're probably right.

I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."

I really don't want to hear about your religion, and I don't want to see your Jesus Loves You gifs posted to the all tech Slack channel.

Sure, but that sort of behaviour is plainly abusive unless you're actually working in an explicitly religious setting.

But merely saying "I'm taking next Wednesday off to celebrate Eid" ought to be fine everywhere, as is "this weekend I'm singing in my church choir then going for a picnic".

Similarly, wearing a wedding ring or mentioning that you have a partner should never be a problem, but issuing a company-wide invite to your next sex party likely will be.

"Personal" isn't a synonym for "intimate". It's reasonable to assume that people are able to share the former without forcing their colleagues to deal unnecessarily with the latter.

Both Merriam-webster and thesaurus.com have intimate as a synonym for persaonl. Thesaurus.com says its one of the strongest.

I get that.

One persons level of comfort is not the same as others, so just saying I want people to be comfortable having their religious opinions respected is not a simple request.

Some religious opinions are basically oppression of others. I refuse to allow people to be bigots in my presence regardless of their reasoning.

Having previously been a member of such a religion, and having left it specifically over human rights issues, I am delighted to inform you that there are many individuals who identify as members of such religions but who are not personally bigoted, and who in fact may privately be uncomfortable about that aspect of their religious belief. If you already know someone, and you have reason to believe they're not bigoted, but then they out themselves as a member of some such group, you don't have to assume the worst.

Unfortunately I am going to have to disagree.

Also as someone who was a member of church which had anti-christian ideals, pointing out the hypocrisy can be the only way for them to question what they are in. Doing and saying nothing helps no one.

There's a large middle ground between saying nothing in the face of bigotry and proceeding immediately from "oh you're a member of <group>?" to an itemized list of hypocrisies, without stopping to find out what the individual person in front of you actually thinks about said hypocrisies. All I'm advocating for is that last: talk to people like they're people, not like they're mindless members of <group>.

This says a lot more about you than them.

It says a similar amount about both of us.

As a Catholic I agree with the parent. "Street preaching" never works and bothers people. There are better ways to evangelize.

Work environments are professional environments.

>I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture

Yes, you want to feel like the people around you feel safe to share it. Everyone with things that are uncomfortable to hear have learned that they're not. They know the polite fiction to talk around it and make you feel like they're open. They're not.

Of course people know how to hide things that aren't safe to tell everyone. I do, however, genuinely mean what I'm saying. I worked somewhere once where the nature of the work meant almost everyone was of a particular political persuasion. I was of the opposite political persuasion. I was also one of the most junior employees there. It was a good enough bunch of people that I felt safe mentioning it in passing one day, and it led to a really great conversation. I was not afraid of being fired for it, but more importantly, I was not afraid of being ostracized for it.

Oh. I see the disconnect between us.

To me, either the culture bubble is extremely strong in your area, or being able to admit alignment with ideas shared by a major political party in an area where another party is more popular is an very low bar.

On the scale of topics that I conceal about myself, politics is as easy as talking about the weather.

This was Washington, D.C. during the Bush years. I could more easily have admitted to an ongoing affair or a cocaine habit.

Why are there people that want this in the office? Don't want this.

I'm not saying that people should talk about this all the time, but are you saying you don't want people to feel able to mention key details of their personal life?

I want to be free from being burdened with your unmet social needs and I want to feel safe when rejecting that burden you wish to push onto me. Make some friends or pay for a therapist, your coworkers aren't there to be your social support.

It's fine if people feel like discussing certain details of their personal lives. What the gp specifically urged people to discuss (In particular - disability and religion) are topics that have been considered not good ideas for the office for a very long time. Apparently some people want to change that - as I said, don't want this.

I'm spending almost a third of my life at work, no shade to the people having to work to pay the bills, but I'd like to get a bit more than just that out of that time: Learn new skills, meet interesting people, have good conversations, have fun. Having something akin to friendship with long-term coworkers and collaborators makes all of that much easier.

Isn't this just an attitude you get when working in a bad environment or with people you don't like?

It's the difference between allowing something and encouraging something.

Does your religion proscribe death to those who leave it? They may feel safe talking about it but I don’t feel safe hearing about it.

My religion uses hallucinogens in ceremony and if I got fired for speaking about my religious practice I would certainly sue the shit out of them.

> Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.

Work is not a safe space. The people who say they want everyone to feel safe in their speech usually (actually, almost always) want people who agree with them on

> family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing,

Pretty much this. For those of us who had to live through the Great Awokening in places like San Francisco, the workplace became a place to be questioned and re-educated in your political and moral beliefs, unless you already had the correct opinion.

Except, even if you did, you could always be just a little purer. You could show off to your coworkers how you were a better ally than them, maybe they would be as good as you if only they “did the work" harder.

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/memory-hole-archive-... captures the experience pretty well

The answer for years was to just keep your mouth shut while the hysteria subsides. It still is likely the right answer. In theory bringing everything to work would be great in a perfectly liberal environment, but we just don't live in that world. The illiberal and the intolerant will just gain leverage over you in a competitive environment such as the workplace.

What a load of bollocks.

Some religions and cultures are more accepted than others. I don't think that works for less accepted groups. People are very intolerant in general. And they are especially not intolerant of those who are intolerant...

Silence is always the preferable choice in those matters.

I agree with you, and also the company shouldn't be encouraging people to bring their whole self to a mandatory work retreat and then firing people who do.

Probably so, but it was incredibly ill advised of Netflix to admit to this. That’s what I find the most shocking, far more than the firing itself. I cannot fathom how admitting “yeah we fired them for going to therapy” plays to their benefit.

Because at some point their emails about the firing will be subpoenaed, and if they lie about it now it's going to bite them harder later.

They still didn't have to outright confess to the crime though. When talking to journalists you're allowed to say "no comment".

That's why we got training at Google that more or less told us not to put these kinds of things in writing.

Remember: the e in e-mail stands for evidence.

And the O in RTO stands for Oral-communication-only

"Remember: the e in e-mail stands for evidence."

Were you told this literally?

It's a common joke, but it's not something you would find literally in the Google-internal official material. They ain't that stupid.

The joke ain't Google specific, I might have picked it up working in finance. If you bing the phrase, you'll find plenty of hits in published articles.

Yeah when I worked at Deloitte Consulting, we had similar training that said something to the effect of "don't put something in an email that wouldn't feel comfortable as a newspaper headline".

"assume your mother, and/or the courts, will read it." was the version I heard

And the s stands for secure

>>> bring your whole self to work

This one always seemed like an "invitation" to demonstrate that you have the correct life experiences and attitudes.

Like those holistic admissions essays that sprung up when universities got banned from explicitly treating applicants differently based on race.

It's more likely incompetence than malice. There's a reason people don't share everything about their personal lives at work, and sometimes leaders think forgetting that will make everyone better off.

> "let us pay for a personality test so we can know each other better"

CliftonStrengths, home of the Corporate Autism Test. Just which of those 35 Signature Themes(tm) will be the ones that get pulled out that look like the giant autistic red flag?

laughs in Ideation, Connectedness, Belief, Intellection, and Input

There's a huge difference between being yourself and not having a filter.

I absolutely think people should be themselves at work. In my mind this generally means not acting like a robot or treating other people like toasters. It is psychologically crushing to operate in a they're all workplace where people do that. The best managers I've ever had were those I could discuss my emotions or that of my team with.

That said, there are clear lines about workplace decorum.

It's one thing to say " I find this new Direction very frustrating for reasons x y and z, and the team morale is low", but another thing to say "i think the new leader is a dipshit idiot"

For some reason people think being yourself means having no filter

Exactly. The 'whole self' also includes a deliberate thinking mind. People often equate feeling free and being yourself with losing all inhibitions and restraint. That may free great for a while, to unburden yourself, but its a strict subset of your capabilities.

I'm now in a team where I don't particularly like any of my coworkers due to all the things they have shared over the years which has accumulated in a persistent ick about all of them.

I can work with them fine, I just don't want to share any part of myself with these people and invite commentary from people I do not respect.

You are still not being yourself though, if you have to suppress the tendency to call someone a dipshit idiot. It is arguable whether the "self" in that case needs some work or not, but the idea about "being yourself" is being able to express yourself freely without giving it any conscious thought. Think of the setting where you are with close friends, and let the conversation flow freely. Having to filter yourself is the opposite of that. In reality, you can never truly be yourself in an environment that you do not own without risking dire consequences or opposition (even when you own it, this eventually becomes the case). So I think not being yourself is a good and necessary compromise for harmonious functioning within an organ, and there is no need to soften this by saying that having a filter is different from not being yourself.

The real challenge lies in properly tuning the strength of this filter, being deliberate with it and knowing what can be said, and what cannot be said. The people who act like robots err on the side of extreme caution, and are unwilling to invest time and effort into tuning and developing this filter. They also don't realize that this makes it impossible to connect with people, to their own demise.

Maybe this is a cognitive or neurodivergence issue. Most intelligent people can filter without any conscious work.

I might act different if I am at a house party versus playing with my newborn, but I consider those both to be me, just in different situations.

Similarly, if I'm playing chess, I don't following the rules as contrary to my identity. I see myself as a flexible and adaptive problem solver.

I think you are on to something though and can imagine a person having a different self-identity that is less adaptive.

I believe that this is the case where the "self" needs some more work, as in it is not well-adapted enough to its total environment yet. This can be due to a myriad of reasons, neurodivergence or other neurological problems are often a possible culprit due to an altered cognition, but don't need to be. If someone just doesn't give a crap or doesn't understand the consequences of some kind of behavior (or the lack thereof) in some situation, they will not be inclined to develop a more appropriate behavior for that situation.

I think that's a good way of putting it. It explains why that particular type of Behavioral inflexibility struck me as immature or coddled.

The challenge is that your line for filter is another person's line for censorship and a third person's line for "not being yourself".

Yep, that is inherent in the Human Condition. Other people have different opinions than mine.

I mostly curious why people seem to expect a world free of this challenge, and look for obviously wrong black and white rules to avoid dealing with that reality.

I don't have any shocking story, but I also was once made to participate in a day long group bonding exercise.

one activity was for each member of our department to grade the overall "personality" of our department using several personality dimensions (e. g., kindness, competitiveness, etc.)

what I think i learned was that each of us projected our dominant personality traits onto the whole group.

eg, the hyper competitive climber said our department was cutthroat.

the guy who avoided conflict said it was a happy department with few disagreements.

etc.

beyond that insight, I didn't learn much.

"Bring your whole self to work" was HR virtue signaling to the people favored by DEI, when it was still en vogue.

I always observed that as "bring your whole self, as long as your whole self exhibits the exact same behavior and demeanor as every other corporate employee, ideally wrapped in uniquely colored skin for beautiful decorum".

I've always understood it as talking about your hobbies sometimes, and where you had your vacation, what you did there, etc.

If you're racist or passionately hate such and such people, obviously that's not what was meant. Nobody wants this.

I remember a "beer test" as a hiring practice recommended on HN and blogs. And pointifications about how culture fit is important. And effectively mandatory games playing after work. And "united meritocracy" slogan bullshit.

So, go outta there with complains about hr slogan and dei.

Yes, beer test: would I have a beer with them / did they order a beer at lunch like everyone else

This was a practice that our company had to be explicitly coached away from. Early 2010s. Def before DEI was popular, which feels more like later 2010s.

absolutely. I learned by example early on from our manager what one should say during something like a "vulnerability-trust exercise." : it should be something like "i'm too detail oriented", "i put too much time and effort into my job" or, max, "i trust/expect people to be similarly overly-diligent, etc.".

For an exec to talk about therapy - that is allowed only to the top dogs, like CEO, who can pass any personal crap upon his reports.

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